Sex-based inequalities in life expectancy and quality due to heart disease are repeatedly described, but how gender and social structure play roles in this phenomenon are unclear. Women and men can equally benefit from secondary ...

For patients with type 1 diabetes in Scotland, at age 20 years, the average man has an estimated life expectancy loss of about 11 years; for women, it is 13 years, compared with the general Scottish population without type ...

People are living much longer worldwide than they were two decades ago, as death rates from infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease have fallen, according to a new, first-ever journal publication of country-specific ...

National guidelines recommend that men with low- and intermediate-risk prostate cancer who have life expectancies of fewer than 10 years should not be treated with radiation or surgery, since they are unlikely to live long ...

'Tis the season to indulge. However, restraint may be best according to a new study led by investigators at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and McGill University. The researchers examined ...

A major new Series on health and ageing, published in The Lancet, warns that unless health systems find effective strategies to address the problems faced by an ageing world population, the growing burden of chronic disease ...

Life expectancy

Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining at a given age. The term is most often used in the human context, but used also in plant or animal ecology and the calculation is based on the analysis of life tables (also known as actuarial tables). The term may also be used in the context of manufactured objects although the related term shelf life is used for consumer products. Life expectancy is heavily dependent on the criteria used to select the group. For example, in countries with high infant mortality rates, the life expectancy at birth is highly sensitive to the rate of death in the first few years of life. In these cases, another measure such as life expectancy at age 5 (e5) can be used to exclude the effects of infant mortality to reveal the effects of causes of death other than early childhood causes.